This blog discusses the historical reliability of the Bible, the creation/evolution debate and apologetics in general.

Wednesday, 24 May 2017

The ”Earliest” Animal Dickinsonia Grew in a More Complex Way Than Assumed

Image courtesy of Verisimilus, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.5).

Joel Kontinen

Darwinian evolution would predict that the earliest animals were small and at least relatively simple creatures.

However, the fossil record doesn’t always lend support to this view.

Evolutionists tend to believe that the Ediacaran-era sea creature Dickinsonia was the earliest animal.

A new paper on Dickinsonia fossils published in the journal PLOS ONE suggests that it nevertheless “developed in a complex, highly regulated way using a similar genetic toolkit to today's animals” despite the assumption that it lived “550 million years” ago.

Ediacaran animals are problematic for evolution, as they appear from nowhere without any ancestors, and some of them might still live in our time.

Moreover, soft-bodied creatures should not last half a billion years.

The Cambrian Era is even more of an enigma for Darwinism. There is definitely a limit to how long soft tissues should last – and it is nowhere near 500 million years.

Source:

University of California - Riverside. 2017. Shedding light on Earth's first animals: Complex and highly regulated development of Dickinsonia, one of the oldest fossil animals, broadens our understanding of early evolution. Science Daily (17 May).